00:00:01 Rosemary

If you’ve been listening to our podcast and are curious about the transformative power of Compassionate Inquiry, you are invited to join us for a six hour online experiential introduction to the Compassionate Inquiry approach and community. Whether you’re a healthcare professional, therapist, coach, or simply someone seeking trauma, informed personal healing or professional growth, the CI Experience Event invites you to witness live demonstrations, learn practical techniques, participate in reflective conversations and connect with a supportive community of like minded individuals all in a single immersive day. This event will be recorded and as a participant you’ll have lifetime access to the event recording and so much more. To learn more and register, just follow the link in the show notes.

00:00:56 Brandon

The events we go to become who we are, whether we like it or not, they are there. They are forever in our existence. Some of the things we forget about, and some of them like to keep creeping back in. I believe that as a community of first responders that we have an incredible opportunity to help our communities be better at mental health. If you just took a random stranger on the street and you said, “Hey, I want you to imagine that you’re a firefighter and you gotta go into a burning building and there’s a whole family in there and none of them make it, how do you think you’re gonna think and feel and act after that?” That is a great big huge part of our job, massive part of our job that becomes a massive part of our existence in life. Those become a part of us. They are our story as first responders. If we aren’t preparing ourselves to deal with the totality of our experiences, then we’re not going to be able to fully embrace those experiences, to fully learn from, adapt to, and become those experiences. We can learn to observe our inner world very differently than what we currently do, and so we can learn to choose the path we want to go down after those experiences. This is a huge area of training and preparation that I think we’re learning to start to look at. If we can start to look at our psychological safety the same way we look at our physical safety and protect our people psychologically as much as we do physically, we will see a world, a wealth of change.

00:02:31 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry.

00:02:48 Kevin

So welcome to another edition of The Gifts of Trauma Podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. I am joined again today by my co host and colleague J’aime Rothbard and again by Brandon Evans. Brandon, I have missed three conversations I think that you’ve had since the last time we spoke and I’m really keen to catch up with you today on a lot of things. But maybe firstly, I just want to check in. How are you doing? And welcome to the show again.

00:03:20 Brandon

Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me back again. Yeah. I didn’t know what I was diving into, but here we are wrapping things up already. It’s wild how the time, how the time passes. I’m doing good. I’m about to leave Canada and go back to Costa Rica. And so this is like an annual kind of routine for us. So we’re just in our final stretch here in Canada before we head back. So just kind of going through that wave of life and emotions and, do we have all the stuff that we need to pack and get ready and all the stuff, and make that transition back? But yeah, and then trying to enjoy the last few days by the lake.

00:03:48 J’aime

I’m curious, too, just a little illumination. We’ve been hearing about how much you love to water ski throughout the series. Brandon, I’m wondering also, as I understand that going back and forth piece that I wonder, have you been attending conferences? Have you been scooping up fresh cups of water around the things that are available and alive in the field that you’re serving? Is this a time of the year you take the opportunity to really do that? And maybe we can hear a little bit about that today as well.

00:04:20 Brandon

Yeah, those things have been happening for sure. I was in Kansas City, so there are some conferences that happen in the summer. They happen various times of year. Sometimes I’m flying out from wherever I am to get to where we need to be. This last 12 months has been really focused on getting the foundation up and running. So that’s where the major focus has been. I was just at Fire Rescue International. So this is one of the largest conferences in North America in the fire service, especially for fire chiefs. So this is put on by the International association of Fire Chiefs. And yeah, it was great. Rachel and I, who was on one of the past episodes, her and I presented. There’s a lot of learning that happens at these conferences. And then, yeah, it’s always good to just meet people and mingle and get to know… the relationship building, you know what I mean? Just meeting a whole bunch of new people as well, introducing the foundation to a lot of organizations that were there. So, yeah, it was good. It is always fantastic.

00:05:08 Kevin

Brandon, I’d love to swing back to something you said. I just want to make a note because I want to read you a little something and then swing back to this question that you just offered to me. I was playing my first music gig last night, in a long time. I’ve written some new songs, I was journeying some new songs. The gig was held on an organic farm in a beautiful converted barn. Really beautiful. And before I was singing myself, my partner hosted the gig. So we were just welcoming people there. And I was talking about the act of communion, rather than connection. And this does relate to what you were saying. I’ll get there. Can I read you a little something and then ask you a question? Is that all right? The listeners to our podcast will be sick, sore and tired of me talking about John O’Donoghue, but this is from an Irish author called John O’Donoghue. And I like him because he’s Irish, but it’s not because he’s Irish that I like him. So he has other qualities that he offers. “The way we are present to each other is frequently superficial. We become more interested in connection rather than communion in many areas of our lives. The rich potential of friendship and love remains out of our reach because we push towards connection. When we deaden our own depths, we cannot strike a resonance in those we meet or in the work we do. A reverence of approach awakens depth and enables us to be truly present where we are. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and the arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace. Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready expectant heart. When the heart becomes attuned to her restrained glimmerings, it learns to recognize her intimations more frequently in places it would never have lingered before.”  Now I get that might seem an esoteric introduction into a very real conversation about first responders and mental fitness or mental well being, or the care of people that are doing work that you used to do and are still involved in. But it made me think of you and the people that you work with. And I was saying to J’aime earlier, I heard you a few times, and others over conversations, almost denying this moniker of heroes. And in one sense I can understand why there would be a denial of the labeling of heroes. We’re just normal people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I was suggesting to J’aime that when we read John O’Donoghue like he’s saying there, when we deaden our own depths, there’s something that prevents us from communing with those depths. So when we deaden the depth of our love, of our compassion, of our fear, of our joy, of our humility, of our frustration, grief, when we deaden those depths, there’s something that stops us communing, or coming into communion with those. And I’m saying this really carefully because I don’t want to be disparaging of the very people that we’re chatting to, but let me ask it as a question rather than a comment. Is there a necessity for first responders to deaden the depth of the responsibility that they have? You know, you guys and women meet people in spaces and places that not very many others get to meet people. And in meeting people in those places, that carries a huge depth, maybe even responsibility, maybe even privilege, maybe even honor. And is there a need for first responders to dismiss that depth, just so that they can move through what is needed of them?

00:09:14 Brandon

I think it’s loaded. I think in part, yes. There’s an aspect of the work that we do where we don’t want to be intimate with those things, as much as we already are, as much as we’re already committed to, and a part of, these experiences because of the frequency in which we attend these experiences. Right? If the average person only experiences a couple traumatic events within their lifetime, most first responders are experiencing a hundred. Whether we view that as a really traumatic event or not, that’s the reality of our life, of our existence. And so I think there’s, in a way, we’ve been taught to mask it, to suppress it, to bury it down, thinking, if I don’t get too close, then it will just kind of go away. And we all have those events that we can’t disconnect from that draw us in, whether it’s a person, whatever that thing is, you know what I mean? And so, there’s a part of that. And there’s also times when we’re pulled in, right? So I’ll give you a quick little example, because this is one of the things that just popped in my head when you were talking about this. We responded to a call, difficulty breathing, showed up. Police were already on scene, and we didn’t really need to be there. Police were like, why are you guys here? We’re like, I don’t know. They just dispatched us. So we came. Like, we don’t ask questions, we just go. The police arrived to this residence to notify the mother of the passing of her teenage son, who was just in a car accident and passed. And we just showed up and we were in the middle of this scenario. And do you want to do anything? We might as well. We’re here. So part of it is like, distraction, right? Ah, let’s just take your blood pressure, we’ll see where you’re at, check your heart rate. We’ll do a quick medical assessment. And I was sitting back, my partner, he was in there doing the thing, and there were two or three of us just kind of observing, a little chit chat. I say, my partner, he was on the back of the truck with me that day. And the next thing I know, he’s just embracing and hugging this woman, right? She didn’t need a medical assessment. She didn’t need any of us there. She just needed a hug, man. Like, her kid just died, right? We’re like asking her all of these questions because we have protocols, things we have to go through. Police are kind of doing the same thing, trying to grasp her head around. But the reality is like, the only thing that’s needed here right now is compassion. And that is 90% of our job is like, if we can learn to just be compassionate towards people. In my experience, that helps with the communion versus the connection or disconnection of these events that we go to. It may not always seem like that because of the tragedies that are there, but like when the bell rings, we show up because we want to help, right? The tones go off, we jump in. It’s why we’re here, it’s why we’re called to the job, to go in and help. And it doesn’t always seem that way when we’re on scene, for a number of reasons. You have multiple people, sometimes dozens of first responders, depending on the size of the scene, who are all bringing their own life, their own experience, their own burnout, their own stress. They’re all bringing their own feelings and emotions to the scene, to deal with the people, right? And it becomes this massive event where everyone’s bringing these because it’s intense. You have crisis, you have trauma, you have an emergency scene. And all of us like, okay, what do we do? Everyone’s trying to bring their specialty in there. And sometimes all the training that we have isn’t needed. All that’s really needed is that human piece, is that compassionate piece to just be like, hey, I get it, it’s shitty. And that person just needs that, maybe that’s the word. They need that communion versus that connection. They need someone to just acknowledge that they’re also a human, right? And that, like, I need some help right now. I don’t know what kind of help I need because I’m in crisis and maybe I can’t think straight. And so I think because we see so much of it, we’re going to go to a dozen calls a day, right? Sometimes less, sometimes more. Maybe you’re only going to four or five calls a day, but over the course of the month, over the course of the year, you’re going to hundreds of these calls. And so, like, do we need to make that deep connection with everyone? Do we want to dive in deep with every single person? You know, it’s kind of like showing up at the fire hall in the morning, hey, how you doing? I’m good. Even though I’m not good. You’re just like, I don’t want to… We’re not trained in that manner to break down those walls and those barriers all the time, every given moment. And so that word hero, for us, it speaks to the ego. And there’s a part of it that we need, right? Because we need to do the thing. It’s portrayed in every Marvel movie, right? Like, the hero doesn’t want to be the hero, but they have this gift that’s been presented to them one way, shape or form. And they have their own that hero’s journey that they need to go and evolve through and to do the thing, right? And even though Peter Parker has all these spidey senses, he just wants to be just a regular person, right? And that just. It’s representative of each and every one of us, regardless of what our profession is, what our hobbies are, what our skills are, what our relationships are, we’re just people. Whether we think we have these special abilities or not, we’re not really special. We’re just people. And we can be special in our own regard. Just because maybe you’re an astronaut or you’re a janitor or a firefighter or a bookkeeper or whatever. Like, we are all contributing to one another in one way, shape or form. And there shouldn’t really be a hierarchy. It’s our egos that put those hierarchies in place. Well, I did this, and I have all this schooling, education, so that puts me up here when you’re just down here and blah, blah, blah. And so the reality is, like, we’re all just human. When we strip all that away and we just go out and we throw us all in the bush together for five days, then the roles change because people have different skill sets and they bring different things to the table.

00:14:37 Kevin

Can I offer you something? Just, I want to offer you something just in the middle of what you’re saying, because for me, there’s almost an irony in what you’re saying, and I guess it’s why we’re here. And that beautiful scene of telling that mother that her son had died and she just needed a hug. And you’ll know it, I know you will. From our previous conversations, there’s a Buddhist quote or a quote from the Buddha that says, “If your compassion does not include yourself, then it is incomplete.” So here we have these, mostly men, maybe not heroes, but doing heroic things, going out and meeting danger, and then having to get the cat out of the tree and then having to tell the mother that her son has died, and then having to find the body in the room that has been burned, etc. And there’s something about. I’m being really careful here, Brandon, because I don’t want this to sound like blame. I just wanted to highlight that there’s something, when we can’t turn that light of compassion towards ourselves, when we can’t deepen into those depths of ourselves, that to me, that offers a barrier or something that gets in the way of our own healing. And I don’t know whether this is societal. I don’t know whether it’s Western culture. I don’t know whether it’s lad culture. I don’t know whether this is how the first responders are conditioned and trained. Maybe it is Marvel movies. But I wonder what gets in the way for mostly men who are able to engage with people in that way; beautifully, with strength, with courage, with compassion when needed. What prevents them from engaging with themselves with that same kindness and strength?

00:16:17 Brandon

I mean, I think… I can’t speak for everyone, obviously, but I think there’s a part of it that’s like, you only know what you know. You talked about my father and my grandfather and his father, generations of men. And I can only speak this being a man, right? Like, I look up to those figures in my life, whether they’re a part of my family, whether they’re in society, right? We’re presented and we look at history and we understand our upbringings. Even in the fire service, you come in as a new firefighter and you sit around the table with senior firefighters, those who have come before you. And part of those types of jobs, part of like, sending men off to war, part of being in as a first responder, it’s like your job is to go and do that thing. It’s not questionable. Like, you have to go do that. Right? Regardless of how good, bad, ugly, whatever it is, like that’s your job. You got to go do it. And so I think part of with that, is like we learn, like, okay, I’m feeling these things because we all feel them, but I got to keep going. And I look around the room to observe my peers and everyone else is just doing it. They’re just going and doing the thing. So I think there’s a generational component of men in the broader society where like this is the way, right? Big Star Wars fan, right? Mandalorian. Like this is the way. And so people like us do things like us and we see shifts of that. But big picture, I have a very challenging time talking to my father about personal things. Right? Not just myself. With him, like he can’t talk about it. He doesn’t know how to talk about those things. My wife and I both work in these kinds of spaces, right? Mental health spaces, if you will. He’s very resistant to talking to anybody about those things. Right. And I don’t think that’s uncommon of men from his generation of generations past. We have these examples where we have men, because we’re talking about them, who have a different ability to be able to go inward and view themselves, versus just judging others. And I think you’re bang on. I think there’s great power in that ability to turn inward. When I first was putting the concept together around Fire to Light, that was the conversation. How can we help firefighters learn something new about themselves that they didn’t know yesterday? Right? How can we go down this path of self discovery for ourselves to push through our egos that allow us to do portions of the job, but then they hold us back from the result of what we’re asked to do and in some cases take us down a very dark and dangerous path. Sometimes life ending. How can we not do that? By learning a little bit more about ourselves and helping us narrate our own stories in our heads versus the stories that are maybe put on to us by others, as we move through life.

00:19:09 Kevin

I know J’aime has a question around them, but I did say I would come back to your question that I wrote down. And the whole point of this little segment of this conversation for me was to then ask you. So when you go to was Kansas City, you said the Fire Chiefs Conference.

00:19:19 Brandon

Kansas City, Missouri. I guess there’s more Kansas City’s. You gotta make sure you’re going to the right one when you book. When you book a plane ticket.

00:19:28 Kevin

I already know one and it’s the same one that Dorothy and toto were in, I think, don’t even know if that one’s real. But anyway, so having this part of this conversation and I guess we’re talking about this, turning inwards, looking at herself, being able to say, hey, I’m doing a really big job and it’s really important and I’ve got to have a whole host of skills, soft skills, a hard skill, fighting fires and giving a mother a hug on the same day, next to each other. So when you go to Kansas City, Missouri and you’re in the Fire Chiefs conference and you’re speaking like this, how is it received?

00:20:01 Brandon

I think it’s received well. The individuals that come to those wellness segments are there for a reason. Like, we are making incredible progress in the fire service as we look at mental health and wellness. For us, it’s like, how do we figure this out? Like, how do we go from here to we didn’t even think we know where we want to go, but like, how do we, how we progress from where we are and evolve in our wellness from all the places from job related cancers and cardiac disease to our mental health and well being. And so I had an opportunity, maybe two years ago now to interview the United States former fire administrator, Dr. Lori Moore Merrill. And how she referenced mental health and behavioral health in the fire service was like, we’re stuck in awareness, so how do we move into the operational phase? So when we train in the fire service, we look at awareness levels, operational levels and technician levels. Right. We become aware of something, we learn how to do that skill, we operationalize it for us, and then the technician levels. How can we teach others how to do that? We’re masterful of those skills and so it’s received very well. There’s questions. We have a current framework around mental and behavioral health that we’ve created over the last few decades as kind of where we’re at. And in our research, we learned that those who are breaking out of the shell and seeing a lot of progress are doing things maybe a little or more differently than everybody else. They’re not just viewing this as something that’s reactive. They’re viewing this as something that can be more proactive, more consistent, a part of how we train. Not just we trained on it once or twice, but integrated it into daily routines. And so those who show up, they’re into it. There’s a whole community that is growing, in the fire service, in the health and wellness space. People that are into it are wanting to learn more, to continue to put the pieces together of, how do we bring this back? How do we integrate this deeper? How do we get more people on board? What’s the story? I’m having more and more conversations with firefighters who have like, hey, everyone should probably go to therapy. I just started doing this, and we all could probably really use this, right? It’s like, when we don’t know it, then we fear it. Once we know it, we’re like, oh, that’s not what I thought it was. Right? So the reception is great. Part of that is we work in government, and there’s a lot of, like, check boxes. So people like to portray, say, “Oh, yeah, we did the thing. We’re doing the thing.” And it does sometimes, but it doesn’t always match the reality of what’s happening within those organizations. Right? And so sometimes some organizations are just. They’re bigger ships to try to turn than other ones. And even some small organizations, it can feel like you’re trying to turn this freighter versus a little dinghy. But people keep trying. People keep showing up. Things keep progressing. Over the years that I’ve been going to these things, there’s more booths that pop up, more conversation. It’s still a thread. It still exists. There’s still some head shaking, being like, are we doing anything? Like, we keep talking about it, but where’s the action piece? What are we doing? Or what aren’t we doing? Or why isn’t it working the way that we’ve been told it should be working? And that might speak to that prior conversation we just had, of that, like, of that resistance piece, of the unknowing. We don’t know. We don’t know how to. Like, we say, we got to talk about our mental health, but we’ve never been taught how to talk about our mental health. No one’s ever come in and said, like, even, like, here’s a script. Here’s some stuff that you should do. Here’s a way that you can say it. If you do this, then being able to talk about it will become a little bit easier. But we have to be consistent with doing these things. We just say, you got to talk about it. You got to talk about it. And it’s slowly, like, we’re progressing, right? Like, it’s a bit of a snail’s race, as most things in government are, right? A bit of a snail’s race. And in some departments, their stars align with leadership, with union. They just get the right people in the right places, and, like, beautiful things start to happen. And in other organizations, the resistance is there, and it’s very present, and they got a lot of stormtroopers that they gotta… They gotta push through to try and get those voices heard and to try and like, hey, let’s just try something a little bit different. It might be a little bit uncomfortable, but the reality is, like, it’s gonna be better for all of us in the long run.

00:24:01 Kevin

Thank you, Brandon. I’ll swing back to you in a while. But, J’aime, you had something you want to ask?

00:24:06 J’aime

Since my question formulated, I’ve also been hearing points that I want to touch a little bit, that lead back to communion. Like, what I’m hearing is that it’s great that these conferences are happening and that so much more is emerging. It sounds like a lot more. I mean, a little talk with the robots this morning about the landscape of what exists in terms of services, organizations, conferences for first responders and for firefighters specifically, is vast and fragmented a little bit. Like just popping up. And the call for unification feels important and feels like maybe, Brandon, you talked about this governmental, sort of, protocol way that exists of checking boxes and that feels like also maybe a little bit of connecting dots, but not sinking into those places that can die, that Kevin was talking about. So as I’m listening to all of this and thinking about communion, I just want to keep coming back to this little campfire that’s lit between the three of us around communion. I’m really curious about this projection of the hero image. The more I sit with and listen to you, Brandon, I want to ask you, do you suspect that maybe us projecting a heroic sort of avatar on firefighters is keeping us in this connection, maybe like, “Oh, thank you, you’re heroes.” But we’re not having any depth. And it’s actually creating more isolation because we’re separating ourselves as everyday people from the same firefighters who keep. You keep telling us are normal people. That’s my question to you. Are we creating more separation and isolation by continuing to insist that you all are heroes?

00:26:07 Brandon

I don’t know. I think as much as I’m going to sit here and tell you I’m not a hero. I’m just. I’m just a regular dude, right? We are heroes. We know that, right? We do very heroic things. Not just because we’re called upon the number of first responders that you’ll meet that will tell you stories of when they’re driving with their families and they stop the car to attend a car accident. A person on the side of the road, a house fire. Like, I know a dude who family vacation, out of the car. Like, he’s not a firefighter in that moment, but he is, because this is just something that is ingrained within us as first responders. Right. A first responder isn’t just going to sit back while something is happening. They’re going to approach it regardless of if they’re wearing a uniform, if they’re getting paid in that moment or not. They’re showing up. And is the public’s portrayal of us as heroes holding his back? I don’t know. I think it’s much more complicated. I think it’s much deeper than that. I think it goes a lot further back. I think, as we talked about, I think maybe part of that is this generational portrayal from ourselves, from the public of these things that we will do. We’re regular people that do extraordinary things. And that happens. Not every day. Maybe that. And that is. That interpretation is. It varies depending on who’s observing us in those moments, whether they think that’s extraordinary or not. Someone’s gonna be like, “Oh, my God, you guys are amazing. You saved my life.” We’re like, yeah, you were actually just having a difficult. Like, you’re. You were okay. There was nothing physically wrong with you. You had a little bit of a panic attack. You’re okay. But that’s story that we all make up in our own heads at times. And so I don’t think that the opposite maybe, to answer your question, I don’t think that the opposite would help any more, if we didn’t have that portrayal. Because we also need fuel for our fire to get us in there. Right? And I think that helps being like, we can put a magic cape on, zip it up, and be like, this thing’s gonna protect me. Right? And we probably don’t actually think like that. We know it’s gonna protect us from the fire. And it’s a part of what allows us to go into a burning building so that we don’t get burnt, to do the job. We’ve just learned to push through the fear of actually stepping in a burning building, right? Part of it’s like, I’m not going to get burnt because I have this awesome suit on, right? With years and years of technology built into it that’s going to keep me safe from actually burning. And there’s a part of that drive that I think is needed in what we do. I think we can just start to observe that differently. We can observe that interpretation of the public as the hero and be like, what also does every hero go through? They don’t just go through this physical change. They go through mental capacity change. They go through observing themselves in a much different light. They go through depths of acceptance and forgiveness in the strive to serve humanity in a different level. And all of the superheroes go through that change. They go through that alteration physically and mentally. Right. They all mentally break down at some point and then have to push through it. And so maybe it just is that we’re just not painting the full picture of what that hero journey is. It’s just that, oh, cool, you get to drive the truck and wear the suit. Go do the thing. Wow, that’s amazing. You get to save all those people. It’s like most of us can say, yeah, like we’ve saved a small handful of people, but the handfuls of people that have died that we didn’t get to save is much, much greater. Right? So we have to live in both of those places. We have to try to find value in all of it. Not just in the few, but in the many. Right. Even in the passing, even in the death, even in all that stuff. We gotta live in both of those places. And so I think if we didn’t pump our tires and call first responders heroes, I don’t think it would do us a greater service. I think just painting a fuller picture might help more.

00:29:38 J’aime

Thank you.

00:29:40 Kevin

Again, that irony is coming up for me again. It seems, Brandon, listening to you talking, that if we, the public, could de-escalate our projection of heroism so we could pull back a little bit and say, these are just dudes. Families, mental health, crises, struggles, stresses, strains. If we could just, yeah, deescalate our heroism. And maybe if the people that were doing the work could increase their appreciation of their heroism that you are doing deep work, maybe that could help that balance a little bit and help things. But hey, I’m really interested. We spoke earlier, Brandon, and this is all leading into this, I guess. We talked earlier about bridging the gap. I know you talked with me in the first show and have done with others throughout. There is help for people after the event, whatever that is. Crisis, breakdown, suicide, attempt. Maybe I should say there’s some help after the crisis, maybe not enough help. And you know, you’re painting a picture of Fire to Light, maybe encompassing more of that journey, so before crisis. How can you folks take care of yourself? Before crisis, how can you be preventative rather than waiting for the Sh1t to hit the fan and then starting to clean it up? So tell me a little bit about that. And I just wrote down, where does Fire to Light fit in this journey between before crisis and after crisis. Talk to us a little bit about that, please.

00:31:04 Brandon

Yeah, I mean, you know, in any profession, we train, we prepare. Doesn’t matter what your job is, like, there’s some kind of training that you go through to prepare you for the job that you have. And we’re really good at that in firefighting. And so Fire to Light was founded in this idea of, like, what if we had better preparation and training for the mental and emotional side of the work that we do. Not just to get in, pull the hoses, pull the ladders, put those things up. Like, we train these things rigorously so that it becomes muscle memory, so that we don’t have to think about pulling a ladder out of a truck. We can just pull the ladder out of the truck, put it up in the building. We know a number of different ways that we can do that based on our environment, where it needs to go, so that we can do our job and save the people and do the ventilation, do, do all the things. And our approach with mental health has been different. We don’t do a lot of that. We’re starting to do some of it now. Our approach is, what if we did more? What if we trained in this space to prepare in a very similar manner that we did other firefighters training. I was just talking with my father in law. My father in law was a firefighter for 42 years. We do like, it’s called the Firefighter Combat Challenge. I think they call it Fire Fit now, where it’s like a sport where you run through this series of events up a ladder, do all these firefighter skills, right? He was a world champion, over 40 world champion in his day. And our team or his team that he was on, they won the team event as well for a number of years, not just one. And what he said, he goes, “The thing that put us into that category of being able to be champions was when we all went to go see the sports psychologist, it wasn’t the physical training that gave us the edge, it was the psychological side that gave us the edge. The ability to visualize, to mentally connect to the physical body in order to overcome the fears and challenges of the reality of competition.” When you’re faced in the crowd in front of everybody else, there was a member on the team that no one could beat this individual on the training ground, absolutely nobody. And every single time this person stepped on the competition floor, something happened, tripped up, right? So that psychological piece became massively valuable in that field. And so ,not just like, how are we going to prepare for the crisis, how can we enhance our performance? Right. Divorce rates within the fire service are incredibly high, probably for a number of reasons. Probably part of the characteristics and personalities that we attract and like why? What else is it? What are the contributing factors there? What ability do or don’t we have to go inward? Right. We talk about that hero complex. How does that contribute to all of those things? And so in order to prepare, there’s a lot of research about the physical body and prehabilitation, individuals going into surgery. If they prehab before the surgery, they drastically reduce the risk of complication post surgery, after the surgery. And so to take that idea and concept, that was my experience in the psychological side. I was doing a lot of work. I’d spent years and years with the ice baths and the breath work and meditation and trying to learn more about who I was so that I could show up a little bit differently. Could I do this thing? What do I need to overcome to be able to create the confidence in myself, whether it was to become a firefighter, or start a business or whatever the thing was, and just taking those steps towards my own health, mentally, physically, psychologically, emotionally, having these intimate conversations with my wife, whether it was after an argument, like how do we change those things? And crisis still happens. And so when things erupted for me, like the first thing I did was call a psychologist and my breathwork specialist. Hey, like, “I fucked up, I need to talk.” That was the first thing that I did. For a lot of first responders, it might be the last thing that we do because that relationship isn’t there. So it’s not like we’re going to do this to avoid these things. It’s we’re going to do these to prepare for these things. In the same event of like, a fire’s going to happen, you could go a year, you could go a career with never being first in to a house fire. That’s a real probability for a lot of firefighters. You might never actually fight a fire as a firefighter. You might show up and be on scene, but you might never ever be the first one in there. There’s a lot of variabilities there. Right? But we still prepare for it. We still train for that thing so that when it does happen, we’re going to be able to put it out. If someone is inside and the chances of them being trapped inside, that they’re still alive, then we want to make sure we have the skill set to be able to get them out alive in a fast, efficient, effective manner. And I deeply believe that those same principles apply to our inner world, to our inner state of being. And a lot of us accept who we are, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but maybe we don’t try to overcome some things, right? So we look at a lot of these divorces. Ah, that’s just the way that I am. Oh, yeah, that’s just Brandon. That’s what he does. You’re gonna have to learn to live with it. And I also have to live with that. And like, this quest for this pursuit of happiness, are we happy, in what given moment? What’s the accumulation of that happiness over your day, over your week, over your month? And what are we intentionally doing to contribute to that? Or aren’t we. Are we just living on our excuses, being like, “Poor me, this is just who I am. Everyone else is an idiot. And I’m just going to like...”.We know what we all go through. We know the thoughts that happen in our head. Sometimes you can’t switch all those thoughts off. But we can learn to think differently about our thoughts for sure, right? This idea of our thoughts are not us. Sometimes they just enter in. We’ve all thought really messed up weird stuff from time to time. Just like, where did that thing drop in from? Like, where’d that come from? And so to learn how to be more observant of our thoughts, to learn how to be more observant of our feelings and our actions, we can all do that at so many different levels. And if we can learn to apply that to our job so that we can perform better at work, what I’ve learned is that those things also come back in many other areas of our life. All the training that I learned as a firefighter shows up when I go camping, right? I know how to tie knots and how to tie ropes. I know how to swing an ax. There’s a lot of bridges that happen. For me, I deeply believe the same happens internally. When I learn all kinds of new things about myself. When I face those things, when I learn how to actually look at myself in the mirror and face those things that I’ve been resisting or holding back, there’s this release that happens. You’re like, oh, my God. Wow. It doesn’t mean that I’m free of that thing. It’ll cycle back, right? Life is gonna test you again, but I feel that you can be more prepared for the next time that it tests you. So for the next time that that dangerous thought drops in that you don’t ever want to think about again, but you can’t avoid it because it’s going to show up in some time. We can learn to think and feel differently about that dangerous thought that we didn’t want to drop in. Whether it was about ourself, whether it was about our kids, whether it was about some other person, right? We can learn to observe our inner world very differently than what we currently do. So as we’re talking about Fire to Light and this upstream approach, this is prevention, this is preventative training so that when those things pop up, we can think differently and learn differently. If you just took a random stranger on the street and you said, hey, I want you to imagine that you’re a firefighter and you got to go into a burning building and there’s a whole family in there and none of them make it, how do you think you’re going to think and feel and act after that? You’re going to get some responses, right? You’re going to get some responses. And that is a great big, huge part of our job, massive part of our job, that becomes a massive part of our existence in life. Those become a part of us. They are our story, as first responders. The events we go to become who we are, whether we like it or not, they are there. They are forever in our existence. Some of the things we forget about and some of them like to keep creeping back in. And so if we aren’t training for those events, if we aren’t preparing ourselves to deal with the totality of our experiences, then we’re not going to be able to fully embrace those experiences, to fully commit to those experiences, to fully learn from, adapt to and become those experiences. We will allow them to overtake and pull us down a path. But we also have choice. And so we can learn to choose the path we want to go down after those experiences. And this is a huge area of training and preparation that I think we’re learning to start to look at as first responders, right? We’ve had all of this reactionary stuff. We bring the psychologists in, we need all those people. We need those people to deal with crisis because crisis happens. We know crisis happens. It’s a result of the job. But if we can start to look at our psychological safety the same way we looked at our physical safety and protect our people psychologically as much as we do physically, we will see a world, a wealth of change. I believe that as a community of first responders, that we have an incredible opportunity to help our communities be better at mental health, right? To help embrace the well being of our entire communities. Because we have an opportunity to lead by example. We’re already these pedestals within our community as a police officer, as a firefighter, as a medic. And then we have ones that are pushed further back when we look at our dispatchers, our jail guards. We have all of these first responders peoples in our communities. And if we can become this idea of what it means to be mentally prepared for our jobs, that will spill out, that will help with compassion fatigue that we see within our first responders. It will help us when we show up on scene, embrace communion, be more compassionate. Because we’ve learned to be compassionate for ourselves. So it isn’t like, oh my God, another fucking difficulty breathing call. Are you kidding me? At 3:00 o’clock in the morning. This is the fourth one tonight. Come on. Why are you calling 911? This is a big. Oh, your tooth. You got a toothache, do you? I’m not a dentist. What do you want me to do about that? These are very real for us. And we can also be like, this is my job. I’m gonna go home tomorrow and get some rest. I understand this is a challenging day for you, you know, and we can just be a little bit more compassionate about it, that’s all. We don’t have to get angry at these calls. We can be more compassionate about them.

00:41:14 Kevin

We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate Inquiry community. Stay with us. We’ll be right back. If you’re not a therapist or a healer, but you heard our guest describe the personal transformations they experienced during their Compassionate Inquiry journeys and wonder what, what might that be like for me? There is a program that is offered to anyone who wants to experience the power of Gabor Mate’s approach to trauma healing. I’m Kevin Young and I’ve been facilitating CI Circles since 2022. I’ve seen people transform in many ways. I’ve seen people change beliefs, relationships. I’ve seen people change how they show up in the world. I have seen people literally change how they look in front of my very eyes. There are many, many ways that people change during Compassionate inquiry Circles. Circles is a 10 week small group experience. Click the link in the show notes. That’ll bring you to a webpage that gives you all you’ll need to figure out if this is for you. 

It’s really interesting, Brandon. As I hear you talk, there’s something more general than… And I know your passion is within Fire to Light and helping first responders and firefighters in particular. But there seems to be something more general in the well being of societies and communities and even men, before they come into a first responding role. And I actually, I have a theory that we all find a role or an occupation that allows our adaptive behaviors to be normalized and celebrated. I mean, I’ll stand over that, that we will all find a place where this thing that we do that is just us, you know, it’s just me, we will find a place where that’s acceptable. And I have no doubt that’s any different for first responders. I think people go into roles that facilitate that. So as you’re chatting, I’m thinking of people before they come into first responding roles, whilst they’re in first responding roles, and then after crisis happens that we really could all do with the ability to be more connected to ourselves, to offer ourselves that communion with self, which of course would be preventative. And the final little thing I want to say it was coming to my mind, there’s a movie with Gabor and he’s chatting to some women who had been raped by Bill Cosby, drugged and raped by Bill Cosby. And what he said to them was, “You will never not be a woman that was drugged and raped by Bill Cosby, but you can heal from the incident itself.” I’m referring to you and your colleagues, that you will never not be a person that had to go to that serious incident and that car crash or that fire, or that… whatever it is. You will never not be that person. But you can learn the skills, both preventative and for afterwards, to help you heal from that, if you’re willing to learn the skills. And you said something earlier and I just jotted it down, you were referring to someone else. And I’d like to ask it to you. What you said was, “What could be possible for you?” And I’m just curious being here. You’ve done five episodes of this, and I know it’s a small part of your life and your work. You’ve just been to Kansas, you’re developing Fire to Light. And there are so many fire analogies, aren’t there? And it’s just starting to catch. Fire to Light is just starting to catch.

00:44:31 J’aime

It just got its 501C3 status. It just received its nonprofit status in the last months. Right. We want to say that you have moved through a milestone. Right, Brandon?

00:44:43 Brandon

Yeah, we just got charity status in Canada. That’s all they call it. So equivalent to a 501C3 in the US yeah, that just happened in July.

00:44:50 Kevin

So things are starting to catch light, things are starting to ignite. You’ve got your charity status and so what could be possible for you and what could be possible for the people that you work with?

00:45:00 Brandon

I think something I’ve learned in my life is like, you never know what tomorrow’s going to bring. And so the possibilities are endless. And believing that, right, it’s easy to believe based on what you know from the past of, oh my God, nothing’s going to change, it’s just going to stay the same. And we can also learn things can change. And like the charitable status is a big thing. There’s lots of other milestones that we can go through. So the possibilities, they’re open. I believe that it’s possible that we can help move the fire service and first responders into a place where they are becoming more prepared for the job, where they’re living in a safer environment at work, because we’ve enhanced their safety training, not just physically, but psychologically. And so, and then, that can spill over into their homes, with their families, with their loved ones, with the people that they have to interact with, both at the firehouse and in their day to day lives outside of the fire station. As much as we’re firefighters, we’re are also fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and friends and all of those things. Right. I think the possibility is great. I think there’s a great possibility that we can drastically reduce suicide rates and psychological injury rates, or the length of time that, that our first responders are off, due to psychological injury because we’ve prepared them for those incidences, and they can get back to the thing they love doing in a happier, healthier manner, maybe a little bit quicker. Time isn’t always the key indicator of ,how fast can you get back. But can we keep those people happy in what they’re doing? And I think the possibilities are just there. The possibilities are endless. And like, what are the goals? What are the things that each of and every one of us are after? And what are the things that you don’t want anymore? Have you learned what those things are, so that you can learn to remove them? And that could mean a number of things from a profession. I think a lot of us get trapped in these professions with an inability to leave or a perceived inability to leave, when life might serve you better if you moved on and outward and upward from these things. Right? And then a lot of us, it’s like the possibility to keep us in it longer, happy, like being fully in it versus being like, “Oh my God, I only got I got 10 years left, and then I can retire,” right? Versus that eagerness of wanting to be there every single day when you just start, like, what’s going to keep you in it? I think there’s a possibility to keep more of us in it for longer at a higher quality, right? Not just quantity, but that. That quality piece, enhancing the quality of our life both in and out is such a possibility for everybody. Not the ‘must be nice.’ It’s like, if it’s what you want, what are you willing to do for it? What are you willing to do to get the things that you desire? And we usually look at that as, oh, I want the truck, I want the boat, I want the car, I want the big house. Fancy trips, like, we look at these external things. But most of that evolution is like, what’s possible in here? What’s possible with how you could change your thoughts, how you could change the way that you feel about yourself, the way that you feel about somebody else, the way that you think about somebody else. Like, all of those are real possibilities, right? We shift through them all the time. And then maybe we just always think that Buddy’s an asshole or always think that, I’m not good enough, that I could never… Oh, it must be nice for you. But I just. I couldn’t. I could never. Like, the possibilities are there that we really and truly can do an awful lot with our life, with how we think, with how we feel. I think it’s beautiful. I think that there’s so much opportunity there, when we look at how do we keep people safe, how do we provide them with opportunities so they can feel safe, so that they can better understand who they are? Because it’s for the benefit of everyone. It’s for the benefit of themselves. It’s for the benefit of the organizations, for the benefit of the team. That teamwork piece of getting the team together and helping everybody push through. The more work we do on ourselves, the more we can contribute to our team, whether it’s our family as a parent on our family team or within the organization.

00:48:46 J’aime

I really have loved the way you have humanized the lived experience of firefighters and your affection, your attunement, and that 360 surveillance skill that you have now applied to the people that you’re serving, Brandon. I feel closer to the people who are on the other side up there playing cards, cleaning out the bay truck. Thank you, brother.

00:49:10 Brandon

Thanks for listening. Thanks for taking the time and bringing us on and doing and asking the questions.

00:49:13 J’aime

You know, I have an obsession with Collective Healing. It’s another podcast that I produce. It felt irresistible to me to take this opportunity to look at a very non-abstract way that we can bring the lens of community, collective, communal healing into a sector of our community. And so with that in the center of my heart now and understanding that I’m reaching across from this audience of Compassionate Inquiry practitioners, trainers, mentors, et cetera. Community. I’m curious if you have thoughts about if somebody has become very ignited through this series to become part of the collective of care of responding to first responders. What kind of trajectory, or ideas do you have, that you could recommend for that person who’s feeling like, wow, this feels like a path for me. I would love to provide services and offer space to these people.

00:50:17 Brandon

We’re always looking for people, right? We always need people, whether it’s a local organization, whether it’s us at the foundation of Fire to Light, start knocking on doors and trying to, how do you help serve first responders in whatever modality that you teach or that you work in? And then trying to. We talked about it before, right? Trying to really dive in and understand who first responders are, and how they are so that you can communicate and connect with those individuals, meet them where they’re at in those places of healing. You know, there’s a lot of organizations and foundations that focus on first responders. And so, just some quick searches will bring up some of those organizations within your community that you can connect with. And like I said, like, we’re here, we’re in the space. We know people at the Fire to Light foundation. So whether it’s a collaboration or a recommendation to someone else, we’re more than happy to make those connections. We need all we can get from all the angles and all the sides. The biggest piece is like bridging between the clinicians and the first responders themselves, and that space in between of learning who each other is. How do we connect? How do we touch base, and getting creative? Right. If you’re doing something that you think is a little bit different and something that is outside of the box, bringing new things to the table helps us connect. Right? Like, I just, I met these individuals who are doing firefighter retreats, and they’re taking people muskie fishing and hunting and forest walks and stuff. So they’re not just sitting around with a clinician, just talking in a clinical space. They’re out experiencing life in a healing manner with professionals. But it’s a little different for us. It’s something that we don’t hear all the time, Right? Typically, it’s like I gotta go see a psychologist and maybe that’ll help. Right? And bringing that creative energy into our space, it helps us to see things from a new lens, in a different way that maybe we haven’t seen or perceived it before. Like we know what we know and we keep talking to the same people. It definitely seems like we are just recycling same ideas, often over and over again. So what new can you bring to the table for us and just start knocking on doors and start asking questions.

00:52:16 J’aime

Great. Yeah, that’s what I wonder. If I am getting my Compassionate inquiry training and I have 50 hours of service that I have to do practicing, could I go to my local firehouse? Can I knock on the door, introduce myself, offer space to reflect and practice Compassionate Inquiry? Does that feel also, dangerous? Because this is somebody who’s not quite certified yet, so we don’t want to send them there. Do you know I want some specific…

00:52:47 Brandon

Yeah, so these organizations are going to probably just tell you no straight up or they’re going to be reluctant, they’re going to push back, they’re going to need to get approval from someone upstairs. And if you’re not fully certified, that’s not going to happen. That’s what I’ll tell you right now, especially in this space. Part of that’s because of the perception that’s there. Right? So you’re probably better to start to connect with clinicians that are already working in the first responder space and it’ll be clear on their website whether they do that or not. Right. Some are just focused on first responders, just on police, just on fire, just on medics. Military. Military space is big. There’s been a lot of work over the years with soldiers, and so that’s probably a better place to start just because of legalities. Right? They can help to point and direct you. If you’re moving through… in some part of certification process versus just knocking on a door, they’re going to be like, what are you talking about? Like compassionate. What? I don’t know, lady, we’re cleaning the trucks, we’re busy… That’s just straight up, that’s what’s most likely what’s going to happen. You may know someone in your space, right. Personally, that would probably be a better place to start. Hey, what do you think about this? I have this idea, I’m going through this thing, like having a one on one conversation with someone who is already in your space, who is, you know, a friend, a family member. That may be a better place to start versus knocking on the door. I wouldn’t recommend knocking on the door of a fire station to start those conversations. I would recommend searching out clinicians that are already working in the space, who are professional that you could work with, because they’re going to have a deep insight, they’re going to have relationships already built. That’s probably a better place to start.

00:54:14 J’aime

Thank you. That was really critical to clarify. Thank you.

00:54:19 Kevin

Brandon. Thank you. On behalf of myself and J’aime and Rosemary and all of us at Compassionate Inquiry, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to shine, no pun intended, to shine the light on your world. The stresses, the strains, the struggles, the dangers. You spoke about it with such passion and joy and love. I wish you every success. I just like what you were about and I like why you were about what you were about. And I hope it goes really well. I normally ask a final question, but I asked it of you the last time, so I’m not going to ask you again. So we’ll let you walk off into the sunset without having to think of the big question. Yeah. Brandon Evans, thank you for joining us on the fifth and final edition of our first responder series on the Gifts of Trauma podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

00:55:04 Brandon

Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. It’s been an honor. Thank you for taking the time to listen. Thank you, J’aime, for inviting me on and allowing me to bring some of my friends into this space and to just, yeah, just get down to it and hear things from our side of things from our perspective of the ones who are on this side, doing the work and just helping your listeners gain, hopefully, a better perspective into our life, and what we do and how we do things and what that means, how it… How our jobs show up for us in our life. Yeah. Thank you. It takes a village. It’s been wonderful. It’s been a great honor. Yeah, it’s been lovely.

00:55:38 J’aime

Yeah. May all this energy, effort, love be multiplied through this endeavor, and may it connect to all the others and multiply them. Thank you so much.

00:55:48 Kevin

Thanks, Brandon.

00:55:49 Brandon

All right, see ya.

00:55:50 Kevin

Ciao. Bye.

00:55:59 Rosemary

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

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